Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

This weekend I will be traveling to Missouri for a show and lecture at East Central College. It's the farthest I have ever traveled for a show and I am pretty excited about it! I'll post pictures of the reception.

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Monday, July 30, 2012

Here is another little cyber demo. My students often ask me how to depict transparent things like glass or plastic. The following is one way of approaching these subjects.

There are a couple of things to remember when painting transparent objects. The first is that, obviously, you can see through them so you will be painting what is behind the object but with some distortion. The other is that most transparent things also have some reflective qualities. Think about water, glass and plastics, so you will be painting their reflective surfaces as well.

I start by drawing the item with a mixture of ultramarine blue and transparent red oxide.

Once the basic drawing is done I start blocking in values with the same two colors.

On this painting I decided I wanted to use more local colors on my value block-in so I used some red, yellow and blue in the Rainbow labeling.

Once everything is blocked in and dry I start with the second layer. The buns seemed like the obvious place to begin. When doing plastic like this I like to mix up a bunch of my background in color strings going from dark to light. This is what is going to be used for the clear parts of the plastic. At this point it's just a matter of observing the reflections and shadows as closely as possible.

The highlights are usually among the last things that get painted. It's important to note that they are typically not pure white. I don't really have a formula for what color they are. I usually have to try a couple of things before I get something that starts to look right.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Saturday, July 14, 2012

It can be fun and instructive to document the development of a painting. I have been asked about my process many times by my high school students. This is by no means the only way to approach a painting. In fact, it's not even the only way I approach painting. It's just one of hundreds of ways of going about getting something done and it has worked pretty well for me.

The first thing I did was mix up some "black". I used ultramarine blue and transparent red oxide. They are both pretty transparent colors and I find they work well for this kind of under painting. I mixed a little bit of Liquin in and went at it. I try to get the initial drawing as accurate as I can because it gets harder to correct that type of thing the farther into the painting one gets.

Speaking of accurate drawing, I noticed that I was a bit off on the angle of the right side of the bowl. At this early stage of the painting it was pretty easy to fix. I just adjusted the angle and wiped the old marks off with a little thinner. At this stage I block in the whole painting with a rough transparent wash. I'm still using mostly ultramarine blue and transparent red oxide. I'm just trying to get the values blocked in as well as adjusting the color temperature. The only other color I have introduced at this point is some alizarin crimson for the cherries.

Once I have everything blocked in I usually let it dry over night or if I want to get right to it I will hit it with a blow dryer for a few minutes. this is where the liquin comes in. It speeds up the drying time and seals my gessoed birch panels very nicely. At this point I could probably start in just about anywhere but I chose the cherries. I added cadmium red deep to my palette and a little bit of titanium white for the highlights. There is also a little bit of cerulean blue in the reflected light in the shadowed side of the fruit.

It made sense to continue working into the bowl so I mixed up a neutral tone using burnt sienna and permanent green. This is just a complimentary pair, green with the burnt sienna standing in as a dirty red. This is a strategy that I use pretty frequently. It allows me to adjust the temperature of my neutral tones pretty easily. I used the same mixture for the background.

At this point it's just a matter of filling in and adjusting the value and the color temperature as I go along. I am also trying to pay attention to the edges. If everything is equally sharp the painting starts to look like a cut out. Adjusting edges takes a lot of experience and I have by no means mastered it but I've been getting happier with my results and will just keep at it. painting is hard. It takes a ton of regular, focused practice to make any headway at all.

Friday, July 13, 2012

Monday, June 25, 2012

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

I am way behind with my posting! I even sent a few paintings to the gallery before I photographed them. In the next couple of weeks I will try to catch up and get the painting that I managed to do over the summer online. visitors to this site may have also noticed that my archives are no longer available. This is because I was hosting the images on a service separate from Google and that service is no longer available. Over the next few months I will be re posting over a thousand paintings back to Google.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

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About Me

I am an artist living in Northern California. In 1993 I graduated from
U.C. Davis where I took classes from Wayne Thiebaud, Dave Hollowell and Roy DeForest. I currently teach art at Chana High School in Auburn California. On this blog I have posted 1000 paintings in as many days. I took a break from that strict schedule for a couple of years but since the beginning of 2014 I have been completing one small painting on a daily basis. The practice of completing a painting a day suits my disposition and aesthetic. I have also found that modeling this sort of daily practice for my students is important. I am making these paintings available on ebay. Thanks for stopping by and check back often if you like what you see.